Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
Ernest BeckerRead
We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that ignoring our true mental state has serious consequences.
Ernest Becker highlights the inherent struggle of humanity to confront the uncomfortable truths about our existence. By denying our mental realities, we incur psychological penalties that can lead to distorted perceptions and behaviors, illustrating the importance of self-awareness and acceptance of our condition as human beings.
In practice
In a psychology class discussing the consequences of denial in mental health.
Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.
When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. This double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man... Love, then, is seen a religious problem
All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
If the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it... All our guilt, fear, and even our mortality itself can be purged in a perfect consummation with perfection itself.
Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet.
Reality is very, very contradictory, and so I try to write just perfecting what I see, what I read, what I feel, in a feel-thinking way. Not only giving ideas, or receiving ideas, or trying to explain something, but mainly feel-thinking, a feel-thinking language able to tie the heart and the mind, which have been divorced.
Every creature is a word of God.
One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
When I travel and speak across the country, I often tell college students that we are making a significant mistake when we say to each other that this criminal justice of ours is broken. To say it's broken would be to suggest that it was well designed and had good intentions from the start.
See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil... I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life.
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